Port Arthur baby was snatched 48 years ago this week

Sarah Moor, Beaumont Enterprise

By Sarah Moore

Updated 12:44 pm, Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Drek Gregory Reese, 5-days-old, after being reunited with parents Darrell and Rosalie Reese of Port Neches on Aug. 30, 1968. The infant was kidnapped from his crib at St. Mary's Hospital by a mentally ill woman, who later left him on the porch of a Port Arthur home.
Photo: Archive Photo

Drek Gregory Reese, 5-days-old, after being reunited with parents...

Drek Reese of Port Neches was kidnapped when he was just three days old. The kidnapper, a mentally ill woman, left him on a doorstep two days later.
Photo: AP Wire Service

Drek Reese of Port Neches was kidnapped when he was just three days...

Forty-eight years ago this week, Darrell and Rosalie Reese were celebrating the birth of their second son, Drek Gregory Reese, when the unthinkable happened.

In the early hours of Aug. 28, 1965, the 3-day-old infant was snatched from his crib in the maternity ward of St. Mary's Hospital in Port Arthur by a strange woman, according to Enterprise archives.

Witnesses said the woman, who was described as short, with dark tousled hair and an olive complexion in a floral print dress and flat shoes, had been loitering in the halls shortly before the kidnapping, and when asked had said she was visiting a relative.

The Port Neches couple was frantic, begging the kidnapper to return their son unharmed.

But they didn't have long to wait.

After a two-day absence, little Drek Reese was discovered safe and sound on the steps of a home in the 5200 block of 14th Street in Port Arthur when the lady of the house, Feddie Moore, was awakened early by the sound of a baby crying. At first she thought it was a cousin with an infant who'd come to visit, but when the crying continued and no one knocked at the door, she went outside to check.

The baby was wrapped in a blanket and an old sheet, which were warm and dry although it had been raining that night.

She carried him in, and her husband woke to hear her "half crying and saying, 'Oh, the little baby.'"

"(Ellery) Moore said he realized it was a strange child his wife was holding and immediately through of the Reese infant. He asked his wife if it was 'the child that was kidnapped.'"

After that, it was only a matter of positively identifying the baby by his footprints and having him checked out by a doctor who pronounced him "in good condition." Then it was home again to mom, dad and big brother Darrett.

"It was elation and indescribable relief in the Reese family early Friday morning when they picked up the telephone at their home and heard the baby's physician, Dr. Douglas J. Thompson, say that young Drek had been found and was in good condition," according to the article.

Darrett Reese, who had stayed with a neighbor during the ordeal, came bounding into the house shouting 'Baby, baby, baby' before being lifted by his dad to get a first look at his little brother.

"Our feeling was like a drainage of all our strength and utter elation," Rosalie Reese told The Enterprise. "It's like awakening from a nightmare."

Police tracked down the kidnapper, a mentally unbalanced woman, by nightfall of the day the baby was found.

Several pieces of evidence connected Santiaga Flores with the crime.

Not only did she match the description, but officers found Drek's arm and foot identification bands and a St. Mary's Hospital diaper in her home. Her finger prints were found on a paper sack holding a white uniform that had been left in a rest room near the nursery.

Sadly, Flores, a 52-year-old woman diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, suffered from an old grief that appeared to have prompted the kidnapping.

Years before, one of her children, a boy named Andrew, was injured in a car accident at age 5 and died in her arms on the way to the hospital.

She never really got over it, continuing to talk about it frequently - more often in the days just before the kidnapping, when she'd also begun to behave oddly, becoming nervous and upset for no apparent reason.

A neighbor told police Flores had asked her for some old baby clothes, and then began asking her for milk because of an "ulcer" Flores claimed to be suffering.